An Agency for the Greater Good
by Adonis Nimbus
Summary: Three years ago, yes that again; well, back then, two middle-schoolers from separate schools in the same town share an ability to mask their inner selves. But can they expand that mask to hide the non-existant 'agency' that they claim to be a part of?
1. Prologue

_**I guess this is where I put the disclaimer:**_

_**I don't own the characters from the Haruhi Suzumiya series.**_

_**This idea came to me when watching the second season of Haruhi, which, while I already knew the scene from the novels, made me feel more empathy towards the kind of things that Itsuki and his self proclaimed squad of esper boys got up to that made them all fire-and-brimstone about their mission. Naturally, Itsuki wears a mask, but it is imperfect enough to be noticed, so I toyed with inserting another well known character from the series, someone who's guise is so perfect that even God thinks he is an idiot...  
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An Agency for the Greater Good**

**Prologue**

On that day – I would guess at its date as being about three years ago – I awoke, not so very 'as usual', but questioning the state of my subconscious. I never put much stock in dreams when I was very young, but as I learned about the many variables of dream interpretation, I came to understand the subconscious mapping and how it related to the state of my life at present. I understood until that dream. Who could rightly put their faith in their own subconscious when a teenage girl was destroying the world of their dreams?

Indeed, I didn't even try to interpret the dream; I simply attended school as usual, I didn't trust anyone in my class with my inner thoughts. I put on a well practised façade for them. I'd been doing it since I was a child. Whenever the situation called for a smile, I would have one; sometimes even when one _wasn't _needed. My faux smile was impeccable. Certainly nobody in my school would ever notice it was less than authentic. I was the class representative; I had respect, good grades and many 'friends', why shouldn't I smile? The day passed with the usual tedium and I couldn't help but wonder what it might be like to try and save the world from a rampaging goddess. It would easily surpass this way of life. But my rational mind immediately informed me of the arduousness of having to defeat monsters unbound by logic day after day. Interesting as it might be, it would be difficult, and besides, of course, it would never happen.

When I was younger I met my equal. He had a façade as implacable as my own and a wit and wisdom to match. Unfortunately, even from a young age, his libido was also unrivalled. It was with this friend – Ichigo – whom I frequented a youth centre after school.

"Oh yeah, it's _the_ place for picking up girls of the same age, until we can go to bars when we're older" he would say, and then I would be dragged out to serve as the only conversation on an intellectual par.

Today was no different. I walked past East Middle School on my route home, and as usual he slipped out of the gates in perfect sync with my passing, his black quiff bobbing into place beside me.

"Yo."

The usual, I had to assume. I smiled. He knew it was a false expression, but it helped us look normal.

"Yeah. But, man, you won't believe last night's dream when I tell you about it. It's a Freudian fiasco."

It can't have been as bad as mine.

"I dreamed that my classmate turned into God."

Who? Now I was curious. It sounded peculiarly like my own dream, and I didn't want to add Jung to the Freud. It could get ugly.

"The pretty one, Suzumiya. Thing is, she just started acting weird today, too-" I stopped him, turning to face him and uttering two words that I had never heard before I dreamt them. Things were getting startlingly Jungian…

"Haruhi… Suzumiya…?"


	2. The Thief and the Chauffeur

**C.01 – The Thief and the Chauffeur **

"Oh yeah, that's eerie alright." Ichigo was still himself; I was beside myself. It was like we had walked through a wall that wasn't there and into the middle of the desert; only someone had placed the entirety of Nagoya city there and taken away every trace of sand in this lightless place. The sky (or perhaps I should describe it as the roof) had its own luminescence. The place defied everything I knew of the world, and it was hard to keep my calm. "If I'm right, then we have power here. This is Suzumiya's happy little domain, and we have to pop it."

I guess we should try to learn how to master our powers before something appears to challenge us.

"A duel, then." Before I could respond to that, he was running down the street at full tilt. I never remembered him being that fast, so I figured that speed and dexterity must come under our powers. He skidded to a halt about two hundred yards from me and turned to face me at the same time, the kind of move he could never have done with his poor record in track. He yelled back to me, barely audible even in the silence, and I thought I heard him say 'come at me'.

I did.

The rush was incredible; I moved far too fast to be reasonable. Two hundred yards was nothing at the speed I was moving, and I took a swing at Ichigo Taniguchi with everything my untrained fist had. I managed to even scare myself with the result. Fortunately Taniguchi was fast enough to move because my fist drilled through the cars frozen in inactivity behind him as though they were made of so much dust. My hand was wreathed in fire, but not natural fire, oddly red, crackling, cold fire. I turned just in time to see his fist doing the same towards me, and dived sideways, kicking down to launch off of the ground. I was suddenly airborne, and there was a crater where I had been standing. Tanuguchi was grinning. His entire body erupted in the lightning and fire and he shot up towards me, I could almost feel him finding my centre and swinging towards it. I tried to do the same, and it turned out to be surprisingly easy. Suddenly, we were circling one another at high speeds, sheathed in red light and cracking with lightning. We weren't very controlled, and so we crashed together as a spinning gyroscope of destruction, smashing a hole in the side of a multi-storey car park. The circles were getting tighter as we went, and we moved faster the closer we came.

Then the edge of my sphere of light clipped his, and an ear-splitting explosion occurred. I was on the underside, and collided with the ground, losing my grasp on his centre, and he was sent soaring into the air, until he slowed and stopped himself. Apparently, it was our spheres that were the most deadly feature of our powers. I clambered out of the wreckage of the car park just as Taniguchi was landing. My heatless, electric fire was gone, and he let his vanish also, as we regarded the destruction around us.

"Looks like I won, huh?" he chuckled.

So where are the blue things from the dream? I looked back to him.

"I don't think Suzumiya is annoyed enough yet."

From the way you speak about her I'd assume that she will be in the very near future.

"Yup," he sounded sure of it, so we decided to leave the sealed dimension and see what effect, if any, it had had on the real world. Everything outside of the dome that we _almost _could see without seeing it was as it had been when we stepped inside. The multi storey car park was intact, there were no craters, it was a unique experience, and I felt my grip on logic failing. A brown-haired beauty was causing all this, a girl god. It was insane, it was just the kind of thing the world didn't need.

The return inside the dome was a little problematic.

Somehow with the exhilaration of being able to take down buildings single-handedly came a disregard for the dangers of the real world. As we made our way into the road, Ichigo had put himself directly in the path of a speeding vehicle. It was a sedan; foreign and black. It cornered at Taniguchi like it was running from something, and without the enhanced speed of the closed world inside the dome, Taniguchi was doomed to be hit by it.

He was also on the border to the Sealed Space.

As the car slammed into him, he vanished, and so did the entire black sedan. There were gasps of surprise all about, people had seen. It was going to cause a stir, but I had to see what had happened to Taniguchi, so I made a dash of the last few feet, launching myself through the barrier into the eerie dimensional fault. The car had stopped only a few yards in, pressed against the glowing red bulk of Taniguchi's sphere. Ichigo himself was standing a little taken aback in the middle of the phantom road, holding out his hands as if trying to stop the car manually. The hood of the vehicle was crushed and a plume of thick smoke was rising from it. I suddenly felt sorrier for the inhabitants. The sedan wasn't going anywhere, and surely nobody could be better than whiplashed within.

"The hell!" I was wrong. A man stumbled out of the back seat, about three times our age at least, disgruntled, and armed. "That was a good getaway, damn it! Who mobilised the army?"

"Mister Tamaru," an older voice said, far too collected for any ordinary driver who had been stopped by a schoolboy, "I don't believe the army has anything to do with this." The driver was stepping out, an elderly gentleman with a black suit and a refined air that I immediately recognised as the same kind of front that I used regularly.

"You're right. They're just kids." He lifted his hand, pointing the shining black pistol at the still-glowing Taniguchi. "I don't know how you stopped us, but you'll want to move out of the way and let us pass."

"Eh?" Taniguchi looked confused. "You're the one who could have done me damage, driving like a lunatic." He seemed to have no conception of how dangerous it was to question a man with a gun. With our powers currently untested, I wasn't sure if he could survive a ballistic as well as he could a car.

That test was unnecessary when blue light flooded the dark space around us. In the distance, the sound of deep rumbling stirred my stomach.

"The hell is going on?" the man, Tamaru, exclaimed, before turning towards the curb beyond the barrier. "Let's get out of here, Arakawa." He found the limit of his walk as the barrier prevented his ordinary human body from exiting. "Hey!" And of course, turned to me and Taniguchi. "Let us out."

"We'll see to it as best we can." I said with a perfectly practised politeness, and let my power lift me from the ground. The cold, electric fire erupted about me, and Taniguchi followed suit, we looked at each other with a nod, and then launched skyward leaving two shaken humans below. The blue monster was about a half-mile distant, and was raising its arms to strike another blow to the buildings around him. Whoever this Suzumiya was, her stress relief method was obscenely over the top. Recreating the universe? Who would use stress to excuse that? Haruhi Suzumiya, it would seem. Taniguchi was already on his way towards the creature, rocketing through the air faster than that black car could have managed. By the time I caught up with him his power was radiating so brightly that I couldn't see him within his sphere. I imagined I would have looked the same.

A third orb appeared over a nearby building from the far side of the city centre, a newcomer to this battlefield. Neither I nor Taniguchi slowed. We knew there were more. It was predetermined that others would eventually arrive to fight with us. We knew, somehow, that there were many of us in the world as of last month.

The newcomer flew straight at the monster, ploughing through one of its limbs. The result was negligible. A blow that would have levelled a building punched through the leg of the blue giant and the hole sealed in an instant. The giant swatted clumsily at the third orb, but it moved aside. Taniguchi's orb moved quickly to help the third, darting about the odd luminous eye-spots on the monster's head. It worked. The monster was too clumsy to risk hitting itself, and so its feeble attempts to clear Taniguchi from its face were met with evasion. I took the opportunity to join him, doubling the creature's difficulty as the third tried hopelessly to punch more holes. Eventually, it started to bounce off of the skin of the giant.

"Itsuki!" I heard Ichigo's yell over the rush of wind.

You're calling me at this speed? I'm truly surprised I heard you.

"Keep it distracted, I'm going to _centre_ on one of its legs like before!" I understood. That immense high-speed centrifugal spinning was bound to be more powerful than blunt strikes to the creature's skin. I darted closer to bother its eyes, and Taniguchi zipped down to the third orb, shouting – which I could still distantly hear, if barely – instructions. The third orb started to spin in imperfect circles around the giant's torso. Taniguchi dropped near to the ground, passing close to the stomping feet of the giant and then beginning the ridiculously fast circling. He had locked on to the centre of his circle and would spin until he drilled to the centre.

I saw the third orb stop for a moment, as if looking and observing Ichigo, and then it redoubled its efforts at the waist of the giant. I was so distracted that the giant nearly managed to bat me sideways, but I broke off from its face, diving towards the shoulder where its arm was raised and mentally grasping at the centre of the joint. The spinning was sickening, but I could still keep up with myself. As I drew close to the monster's skin, the invisible tether holding me in my circle manifested and started to shear the limb with impossible force. In a few moments, I was catapulting away as the tether snapped the shoulder cleanly and the giant's extremity crumbled into blue, shimmering sand. A second later, the third orb snapped the monster at the waist and the whole thing fell to the ground disintegrating. Taniguchi slowed and circled the third orb, yelling something, and then they both set off back towards the crashed sedan. I followed, barely able to keep up. They were, it seemed, faster than I was.

The two men were near the car, still, staring down a street that afforded a view of the battle, and the three of us dropped to the ground just in front of them. Taniguchi faded out of his sphere, and touched neatly down on the ground. The third orb followed suit as I did. I landed – a little clumsily by my own admission – beside a slender woman in her mid twenties. She was dressed in uniform for a local café that we had passed, which only made her appearing from the sphere seem more odd. Regardless, her landing was neat, neater even than Taniguchi's.

"Yo," Ichigo said to her, and then turned to the driver and – for lack of a better word – antagonist. "This space should fall apart now. Let's step out of the road."

Nobody was unshaken by the spectacle that followed.


	3. Combat Waitress

**C.02 – Combat Waitress**

"I guess there's a difference between dreaming it and living it," that was what Mori Sonou, the waitress woman, said as she sat down with us all at a six-seated table. The driver – Arakawa – and the man who (it was revealed) had robbed a family through a con and was trying to make leeway across the country before they discovered him – Tamaru – had joined us all in staring in awe as the sky tore apart overhead and ripped open to reveal the ordinary world. The car and with it the money had vanished, and we all stood by the road looking as if we had seen a UFO.

Naturally, the disappearance of the payload was our fault according to Tamaru, and without a car to speed off in, Arakawa followed him and by proxy us to the café where Mori worked. She told us that it was her lunch hour, and proceeded to get us all drinks and sit with us in the partitioned booth.

"At least you people, if people you are, had forewarning," were the words of Mr. Tamaru, who had introduced himself as Keiichi Tamaru, one half of a con-team consisting of himself and his younger brother who was waiting for them at a rendezvous location in Osaka city. It wasn't his original name, but it would be his 'real' name as soon as the paperwork went through, which should be any time today. He was just the kind of dangerous individual that we could do without knowing about the powers we had in the Sealed Space. "What exactly was that and why did the car vanish?"

"I too would like to know. As much as I am not terribly troubled by the loss of one of my cars, they are expensive to replace." Arakawa had a well spoken voice. He must have been raised by a good family, which made me wonder why he had chosen to hire himself as a getaway driver to anyone who could pay. It seemed that he was once a member of the army, he had professed that he was a trained 'combat situation driver'. I assumed that his training was military, at least.

"Those spaces appear before the blue monsters arrive." Ichigo was the one who decided he would explain, informing me in a whisper that we should do our best to convince the criminals that we were powerful in the real world also. "We enter them to destroy the monsters and halt the expansion of that space. You could call us superheroes."

"How does smashing giants in alternate dimensions save our world?" Keiichi was less than pleased with the explanation, but needless to say, after seeing three people cut apart a giant in a matter of minutes, he hadn't raised his gun at us. Indeed, he seemed somewhat fearful, but we could sense him using his anger to hide it.

"If we don't stop it," interjected Mori, "it will _become_ a new world, and humans will have to live – survive even – alongside those creatures."

"They aren't held by the logic of this world, mobilising an army wouldn't be able to stop them. They're beings that are better suited for the Heavens than our Earth." Taniguchi this time, putting it in a way that I felt would serve easily as a description in the future.

"Celestials," Mori put it bluntly, a term that usually conjured images of angels. I suppose it made sense to us who knew that a girl god was behind their creation. Taniguchi and I nodded in agreement. That term was likely to stick.

"Granted, you will not want us to speak of this event, am I correct?" Arakawa presented us with a fact that made my heart sink. How could we keep criminals quiet? The threat of our superpowers could only hold for so long. "Unless you have some kind of organisation which deals with these things. Perhaps if they require services of transport, I could be convinced to assist you." I looked sideways at Mori and Taniguchi. My classmate nodded at me, then at Mori, a wordless request for our silence.

"If you think you can be of use to us," he said, addressing them both, "I'll need contact details. The Agency could find you easily enough, but the stir we would cause in the process might be…" his voice darkened "…undesirable."

It was Mori's turn to speak. She waited until she was certain Ichigo was going to speak no further, and then piped up.

"I will be the one to liaise with you when the time comes." Her façade of superiority made even Taniguchi's look weak. Her glare was like liquid nitrogen. I even believed for a moment what she said next, until I realised quite abruptly that it concerned me, and I knew it to be untrue. "I would advise against any uncooperative actions. I assume you have seen our abilities. They are not limited to those. We are each and all fully trained for the appearance of normal fights also."

I could see the fear creeping into Tamaru's face, and so he simply nodded. Arakawa seemed to be unshaken by the threats. Perhaps he had dealt with other deadly people.

"Of course. I will stay with the Tamaru brothers until you contact me. This is my card. Perhaps the brothers could also be of use to the Agency. They are talented at their art."

"It is appreciated," Mori took the card, looked it over, and then handed it to Ichigo, who pocketed it without a glance, keeping up his nonchalant air of superiority.

"You can go. We will contact you soon," he said. It was frightening the way he spoke, for a Middle Schooler.

Their retreat was slow and controlled only by Arakawa's unwillingness to walk at a hurried, fearful pace. When they were completely out of sight, Taniguchi turned to smile to Mori and, in a way far too cocky for someone as comparatively young compared to her as himself, said,

"You're pretty good." I almost felt like hitting him. Mori just bowed her head and muttered a 'thank you'.

You realise, of course, that now we need to keep convincing those two that we have a massive organisation backing us up. That's what I told them. I felt it was only right to lay out the grim truth. We all knew that we had no power in the real world. If we didn't constantly reassure Arakawa and the Tamaru brothers that the full weight of a powerful organisation was behind them, the criminal in them would in all likelihood lead to them revealing the supernatural world. The repercussions of that were too important to risk.

"You don't get it, Itsuki," Ichigo looked at me as if regarding a student who had failed the college entrance exam.

What exactly don't I get?

"We're going to have to _create_ this Agency. You, me and the Combat Waitress."

"My name is Mori." It was the third time she had had to remind Taniguchi.

I felt my sanity slipping away, but I smiled as if knowingly. If I couldn't keep my sanity, I was going to keep my smile.


End file.
